Just finished another developerWorks chat, this time conducted by Grady Booch and helped by Brian Bryson (ASQ) and Steve Weaver (ADC), about Empowering the A in SOA.

Grady started with a magisterial class warning that SOA is not the acronym of Snake Oil-oriented Architecture but something like a message-passing pattern, where he distinguish it with a big S and a little s: the big S being classic web services and little s being true services offered up by a system as manifest in a set of APIs that let you pass messages/objects and initiate/derive some behaviour from that system. He emphasizes the A in SOA, being good architectures a fundamental factor. Sound architecture – and the processes that lead to that architecture – is a precursor to having SOA used properly.

About the organizational concerns, he recommends us James O. Coplien’s book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development.

About the latest Rational toolset release (codename Caspian), he told us that the modelling tools focuses on modelling of services, because, among other things, semantics of the messages that are passed are a significant design decision. He also told us that Rational has made the architectural decision to base all of their desktop-facing tools on the eclipse platform (a well-engineering foundation for the developer experience).

If you are more interested about the contents of this chat, you can read the transcript. (Updated)

Comments

Comment by Brian Bryson on 2007-12-04 19:24:17 +0000

For additional information on SOA best practices, see Brian Bryson’s presentation on SOA best practices at The Rational Tester blog, http://rationaltester.wordpress.com

Comment by Ferdy on 2007-12-05 01:18:34 +0000

Brian, thanks for the link!